Ginn Weblog: Research Archive

Legal Research Engine

Cornell Law Library - Research Guides - Legal Research Engine

Cornell has developed a search engine to find guides to doing legal research. If you are doing legal research in an area unfamiliar to you, or are having trouble finding the right sources, this would be a good place to look for advice.

Policy File Feature

Policy File is a favorite database of mine. It indexes the output of reasearch institutes and think tanks, both domestic and international. The results are usually linked to full text.
Policy File has added a feature that makes it even better -- when you do a search and get results, it clusters, or facets them on the left -- so you can click on the results in one of several categories: Security & Military, Finance & Economics, U.S. Domestic, U.S. Foreign, Societal or International, depending on the type of institution issuing the report. This makes it even easier to zero in on the results most useful to you.
Policy File is available on the Journals and Databases page, on the A-Z list.

Human Rights Search

Researching a human rights topic? -- try HuriSearch -- a human rights search engine crawling over 3000 human rights websites. It is also available in several languages.

World News Alerts

World News Connection now gives us the ability to set up and receive alerts. World News Connection provides English translations of foreign broadcast and print news from all over the world. You can set an alert to keep up with reporting in other areas of the world on an isssue of interest to you.
World News Connection is on our Journals and Databases page, on the A-Z list. On the search page, enter and execute your search. The link to save the search as an alert appears at the top of the search results page.
I tested this yesterday and did a search for the words iran and nuclear. I saved it as an alert and came in this morning to a find an e-mail connecting me to 47 new articles. You can click on the titles in the e-mail and get directly to the full-text translation.

Catalog Export to Refworks

The Tufts Library catalog now includes a direct export button to Refworks. When you are looking at a single record for an item in the catalog, the Export to Refworks button appears at the top. If you click the button you will be taken to the Refworks log-in screen. When you log in you will be prompted to view the Last Imported folder -- which will contain the record for the book.

If you are not familiar with Refworks, a citation management tool, you can find it on our Journals and Databases Page, on the A-Z list. The annotation includes a link to the Tisch Library Refworks page, with many helpful tutorials and guides.

Global Attitudes

Two internet sources of global public opinion -- this one was highlighted recently in the Scout Report:

"The Pew Global Attitudes Project is a unique, comprehensive, internationally comparable series of surveys available to journalists, academics, policymakers and the public. It aims to gauge attitudes in every region toward globalization, trade and an increasingly connected world; to measure changes in attitudes toward democracy and other key issues among some of the European populations surveyed in the 13-nation 1991 benchmark survey, the Pulse of Europe (also directed by Dr. Albright and Mr. Kohut); to measure attitudes about terrorism; to examine the intersection between the Islamic faith and public policy in countries with significant Muslim populations; and to more deeply probe attitudes toward the United States in all countries. Recent Global Attitudes surveys have gauged worldwide opinion about international news developments."

World Public Opinion.org
"The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) launched WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO) in January 2006 to provide a source of in-depth information and analysis on public opinion from around the world on international issues. As the world becomes increasingly integrated, economic and security challenges have become increasingly global, pointing to a greater need for understanding between nations and for finding global norms. With the growth of democracy in the world, public opinion has come to play a greater role in the foreign policy process. WPO seeks to increase understanding of public opinion in specific nations around the world as well as to elucidate the global patterns of world public opinion."

FRUS volumes online

From beSpacific:

Press release: "The Department of State has released Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, volume VI, Vietnam, January 1969-July 1970, the first of five volumes to cover the end of the Vietnam war. The Presidential election of November 1968 had demonstrated just how divisive Vietnam had become in American society and politics. Vietnam was the new President's first priority. The volume demonstrates that in the early months of 1969 there was no specific plan to end the war. Rather, the Nixon administration searched for ways to demonstrate to the leaders in Hanoi that there was a new "firm hand at the helm" prepared to both talk and fight. Nixon and his advisers hoped to convince Hanoi that it was dealing with an adversary that would negotiate only from a position of strength. This volume documents the search for the formula to convince Hanoi: the secret bombing of Cambodia, Vietnamization and U.S. troops withdrawals, integration of the secret war in Laos with the conflict in Vietnam, covert operations against North Vietnam, and most importantly the U.S. and South Vietnamese attack on the enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia."

Links to press release, summary of the volume, and PDF download [Volume VI, Foreign Relations, 1969-1976, Vietnam, January 1969-July 1970], all available here.

As an additional bit of information, Prof. Henrikson pointed out to me this week that FRUS volumes from 1861 to 1960 are now available in digital format here: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/

2006 OECD Factbook

SourceOECD: factbook
2006 Edition just released. I learned about it immediately from my RSS feed to ResourceShelf. (For those of you who came to the RSS workshop yesterday, or who are wondering if using RSS is worth it.)
Many of the tables are available online.

"The OECD Factbook is an essential tool providing a global overview of world economic, social and environmental trends. It brings together in a single publication 100 indicators that are essential for evaluating the relative position of any OECD country, both at a given moment and over time, in the following fields :

Population and migration
Macroeconomic trends
Economic globalisation
Prices
Labour market
Science and technology
Environment
Education
Public policies
Quality of life
and a special chapter dedicated to Globalisation

The 2006 edition presents many new features, including indicators on the "brain drain," Tsunami recovery, aid, and cultural and leisure activities. It also includes data on key non-OECD member countries, namely Brazil, China, India, The Russian Federation and South Africa."

Search Exalead

Exalead
At a presentation yesterday by search guru Gary Price, I learned about an interesting new search engine based in France called Exalead. Among other useful features, in the Advanced Search interface you can do proximity searching (requiring that one word be near another). You can also easily limit your results to a particular country or type of document.

I did a search for human trafficking as a phrase and for the word trafficking near the word refugees. Got some interesting results. On the left you can see how many results are from North America and how many from Europe and choose either. You can choose to look at just the pdf documents, and there is a list of related terms -- all clickable to expand your search.

The search results show thumbnail images of the pages right in the results list. Clicking on them allows you to open the page within your results list -- so if it's not what you expected you can close it out and you are still in your list.
Try comparing what you get with Google or Google Scholar and see what you think!

Alerts from Jane's

Jane's Saved Searches and Email Alerts
The Jane's Information Group has enhanced its services to provide e-mail alerts. You can now construct a search, save it as an e-mail alert and receive notification when something new matches the search criteria. Complete instructions are provided at the link above.

Who Cites Whom

Have you ever wanted to find out who is citing a particular author or article?
We have access to a database called Citation Index. It is listed on the Journals and Databases page, on the A-Z list. You can go there and do a Cited Reference Search.

For instance, if I want to know who has cited Michael Glennon's 2003 article in Foreign Affairs, I can search for Glennon, M* in the Author field, and Foreign Aff in the Cited Work field. (There's a list of the required journal abbreviations.) In the list of results, I can check off the main entry for the article I am interested in and click Finish. I get a list of the articles citing this article. You can use the Find it @Tufts button to see if the articles are available electronically or in hard copy.
This is one way to track the impact that a particular author or article is having in the field.

I mentioned this in my Research Strategies workshop. A student asked if there was a way to do a similar search for books. I did not know of a way to do it, but later the student came by to show me an existing method from Amazon.
If you look up a book on the Amazon site that is included in their "Search Inside the Book" program, they may list other books that cite it. As an example, if you look up The Lexus and the Olive Tree, click on the record for the book, and scroll down below the Inside the book section, you'll find a section labelled Citations. It lists 265 books that cite this book.

If anyone is aware of other citation tracking tools for books, I would be interested to hear about them.

Human Trafficking Portal

The National Multicultural Institute has created a new portal on Human Trafficking. It is searchable and browsable. The four areas of the site are Human Trafficking, Child Labor, Bonded Labor and Sex Slavery. You can also search by region. Articles are in full text and come from a wide variety of respected sources.

New Wiki: Wex

The Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School has changed the format for its "Law About ... " pages to a wiki called Wex. Some of the subject pages look very useful. The Human Rights page, for instance, gathers together links to the major human rights instruments, enforcement venues, monitoring organizations and key internet sources. It's a new work in progress, so there are a few glitches, and it's a wiki, so you don't know the authority of the contributors, but it looks like a useful and interesting project and a starting place for research.

MonitorThis Keeps You Up-To-Date

MonitorThis is a new service that makes it simple to search for a topic in lots of different news sources. This "metasearch" tool -- one that provides searches to a lot of different targets -- takes your search terms and provides links to generate RSS Feeds for all the major aggregators. The current list of sources is extensive: Technorati, del.icio.us, Google News, Blogmarks, MSN, Yahoo, Icerocket , Feedster, Blogdigger, Plazoo, blogg.de, Find articles, furl, Flickr, and Google Blog Search.

Once you've entered a search term on the MonitorThis site, you'll get an OPML file that you can then import into whatever newsreader you use (Bloglines, NewsGator, etc.). You'll end up with one feed for each of the target services MonitorThis covers. (If your aggregator gives you the option, I suggest creating a folder and importing the OPML file into that.)

Whenever any of the search and blog services has a new result that matches your query, your aggregator will provide you a link to it. It can be overwhelming for broad subjects, but if you have a specific topic you're following, it's an easy way to search lots of places at once.

International Legal Research Tutorial

International Legal Research
"This tutorial is designed to teach students research strategies and methodology for researching both print and electronic sources of international legal materials. The tutorial includes review questions and a final review to give students an understanding of how these materials are organized, and to teach them how to locate international legal documents such as treaties, agreements and the documentation of international organizations."

This is a great new research tool, compiled by two experts in the field.

Foreign Law Translations

The Institute for Transnational Law at the University of Texas has put up a new site for Foreign Law Translations. A link to this site has been added to the Fletcher page on Comparative and Foreign Law. Their description of coverage:

Institute for Transnational Law

This site is a resource for French, German, Italian, Austrian and Israeli legal materials in the fields of constitutional, administrative, contract and tort law. The English translations of decisions from Germany and France include cases from the Reichsgericht, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Bundesgerichtshof, the Conseil Constitutionnel, the Conseil d'Etat and the Cour de Cassation.

Google Blog Search

From Search Engine Watch:

Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search
By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor
September 14, 2005

Google has introduced its long awaited blog search service, becoming the first major search engine to offer full-blown blog and feed search capabilities.

It's been nearly two and a half years since Google purchased Pyra Labs, the company that built the hugely popular Blogger publishing service, and Google has been promising blog search ever since then.

While Google web search has allowed you to limit results to popular blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results for some time, and its news search includes some blogs as sources, Google hasn't had a specialized tool to surface purely blog postings. In fact, while all of the major search engines have been dabbling with blog and feed search, none has done much with blog search until now.

Google's new service (in beta, naturally) is available both at google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com. Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtually real-time, according to Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search.

Student Subscriptions

In one of the Library Orientation sessions yesterday, students asked about discounted subscriptions. To find out if a particular publication has a student price, you can search for the title of the publication and the words "student subscription" in Google. The following are available:

Boston Globe

Financial Times

New York Times

Wall Street Journal

Economist
Please note that we do have an electronic subscription to the Economist available to you on our A-Z list of Journals and Databases.

Guide to International Law affecting Refugees

Forced Migration Online has a series of Research Guides on their Thematic Resources page. The newest one deals with International Law and Legal Instruments. It looks comprehensive and useful. Here is the Overview paragraph:

"Refugees are human rights violations made visible. Consequently, their precarious situation and the protections afforded to them cannot be understood without recourse to the human rights standards developed within international refugee law (IRL), international humanitarian law (IHL), and international human rights law (IHRL). A common tendency is to equate refugee law and refugee protection with the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the status of Refugees (from here on in the RC). However, analysis illustrates that the problem of refugees and the solutions to those problems cannot be understood unless viewed through a human rights lens, taking into account the various UN human rights Covenants and treaties. In addition, attention must be drawn to the regional arrangements that provide protection to refugees, such as the African Union, the Inter-American Commission and Court, and the European Court for Human Rights."

RSS mainstream for students

A recent article in USA Today outlines how RSS feeds are becoming part of the mainstream for student research.

RSS feeds college students' diet for research
By Anh Ly, Gannett News Service
Lilangi Ediriwickrema, 21, peruses summaries of the latest articles about stem cell research. She quickly dismisses the first three articles but pauses on the fourth before clicking to read the entire story.
A time stamp on the corner reveals the article was posted just two minutes earlier.

"It saves me a lot of time and energy," says Ediriwickrema, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. "I can quickly find what I'm looking for without having to go from Web site to Web site, and I get the most up-to-date information."

Ediriwickrema is part of the growing number of on-the-go, sleep-deprived students who recognize the value of an Internet technology called RSS and are milking its benefits for use in the classroom. More...

Ginn Library has a new Research Guide to using RSS for research at Fletcher.

Open CRS

ResourceShelf

Congressional Research Service
Source: Center for Democracy & Technology
New One-Stop Resource: Search and Access Congressional Research Service Reports from Several Respositories
A new database, Open CRS, from the Center for Democracy & Technology has just launched. Open CRS aggregates material from several well-known open-access CRS repositories. Cool! More about Open CRS in this article.
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Government Info Online

Government Information Online

This service offers a choice between live chat reference or e-mail reference with a 48-hour turnaround. Boston Public Library is a participant. If you are having trouble locating government information, this might be a good resource.

"Government Information Online (GIO) is a national pilot project that will establish a viable model for online cooperative virtual reference and information service that specializes in answering questions about government information. Libraries contributing their time and expertise to the project (over thirty institutions across the United States) represent public libraries, academic institutions, as well as state library and archive departments. All the project's participants are official depository libraries who participate in the U.S. Government Printing Office's Federal Depository Library program, and many are also official depository libraries for their respective state governments."

GovTrack.us

LLRX.com - The Government Domain: GovTrack.us: Under Development

The attention-getting feature is this: GovTrack will send you a notice via email or RSS feed when official legislative websites such as THOMAS report that action has occurred on legislation of interest to you.

Google Uncle Sam

LLRX.com - The Government Domain: Why Google Uncle Sam?
By Peggy Garvin
Published February 13, 2005

This article contains an interesting comparison of results using Google Uncle Sam and FirstGov
The conclusion seems to be that, as usual, it's a good idea to use more than one search engine. If you are looking for government information, you might want to try Google Uncle Sam -- it searches all .mil and .gov domains. See the article for more details on how it works and what the drawbacks are.

So much media/so little time

None of us has time to watch every news program of interest.
You come in to school and someone asks, "Did you see the interview with Warren Hoge on Charlie Rose last night?" You didn't and you wish you had.
You could go to the website for the Charlie Rose show and listen to the audio, but that will take as much time as watching the show. Or, you can go to LexisNexis and get the full transcript of the broadcast, skim it, print it out, read it when you have time.

Some of the last weeks's shows:

Interview with Iraqi Interim President Ghazi al-Yawar
Will Oil-For-Food Scandal Bring Down Annan? with William Luers, Warren Hoge
Robin Wright from `The Washington Post` on Her Trip to Iran; Discussion With Iran`s Ambassador to the United Nations
Nuclear Freeze in Iran?; Designing Reality

If Charlie Rose is not your favorite, Lexis includes transcripts of many other broadcasts including CNN, NPR and the major networks. On the News search page, choose News Transcripts and All Transcripts. Click on the Sources link next to the All Transcripts box to see what's included.

LLRX -- Gumshoe Librarian: "Where in the World Is..."
A Bibliography of Recommended Websites for Global Research Issues
By Barbara Fullerton and Sabrina I. Pacifici

"This bibliography includes links to 73 websites that Barbara and Sabrina presented during their July 13 program at the 2004 AALL Annual Conference in Boston. These sites represent a broad but selective range of resources on topics that include business and corporate data, global news, search engines, guides to international and comparative law, country profiles and statistics, locating people, businesses, places and useful services around the world, banking resources, and data on terrorism and security issues."

One that looks useful is WatchThatPage, "a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page."

HURISEARCH -- New human rights search engine

ResourceShelf

New Database, HURISEARCH
"HURISEARCH is a HUman RIghts SEARCH engine. It aims to:
provide one point access to all human rights information published by human rights organisations worldwide, and particularly human rights NGOs
provide a searching tool with egalitarian and known ranking and indexing principles without regard to commercial agendas
provide a searching tool which is overseen by human rights people specifically to meet human rights needs
provide an easy to use multilingual human rights search engine [French and Spanish language interfaces available]
HURISEARCH currently directly searches over 1300 human rights NGO sites in 58 languages." Search technology is provided by FAST.
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Locating Congressional Research Service Reports

CRS Reports can be very difficult to find. Some of the sites that used to provide them have recently pulled them. The search tool highlighted below is a good way to find the ones that are still available on the Web.

New Search Tool to Locate CRS Reports On the Web
From zFacts.com, using Google technology, Find 'Congressional Research Service' Reports provides a searchable interface to locate the 1,000 reports that are available to the public free on the web, hosted by a variety of advocacy sources. Supports keyword search as well as recommends and describes searching by report Order Code.
beSpacific

The Memory Hole has archived many of the reports recently pulled from the Web .

For a very comprehensive discussion of the issues of access to CRS reports, see the Project on Government Oversight.

Law in the foreign press

Law in the foreign press is a regular feature of JURIST's Paper Chase. Today's entry is below; some of you might want to get the RSS feed.

JURIST's Paper Chase - Legal news worth thinking about

Law in the foreign press ~ Wednesday, March 3
Zak Shusterman at 1:40 AM

Some of the legal stories running in Wednesday's foreign press... Nairobi's East African Standard reports that the presidents of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have signed the East African Community Customs Union. The protocol, establishing a single market and investment area, requires the removal of non-trade barriers within five years.... ABC Australia features attempts to restore a voluntary euthanasia law in the Northern Territory. The local law was overturned by a Commonwealth legislation in 1997....

When a Search Engine Isn't Enough, Call a Librarian

So, O.K., maybe this is a bit self-serving... but in today's NY Times, JEFFREY SELINGO writes about the role of librarians in the Age of Google. "...with a widespread public expectation that answers can be found almost instantly by typing a few words into an Internet search engine, librarians increasingly find themselves on the sidelines in the question-answering business. So they are slowly warming to the idea that they must educate the public about ways to sort through the mountain of available information.

"When Google doesn't work, most people don't have a plan B," said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is teaching a course on Google this quarter. "Librarians have lots of plan B's. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google....

...Librarians fear that people are too trusting of the Web, particularly for health and corporate information, areas in which some libraries say they have been receiving fewer inquiries in recent years. In both fields, the accuracy of the information often depends on its source. In New York and at many other libraries, cardholders can gain access to subscriber-only databases - including popular ones like Medline Plus for medical information and Gale for business resources - from a remote location.

Another service that librarians provide is one they say most patrons searching on the Internet need: the ability to refine a question. Through an interview process, librarians try to sharpen the way a question is phrased to yield a better response. That step can save a lot of time, Mr. Janes said. "

Test this out with the Ginn Reference staff - you find them to be helpful, knowledgeable,and appropriately sceptical of the powers of Google.

ABI Inform has direct export to Refworks, Endnote

If you are using a citation manager like Endnote or Refworks you'll be glad to know that you can now export your citations directly from your marked list in ABI Inform and in the Wall Street Journal database.
If you haven't used a citation manager, Refworks is free for Tufts students -- see my prior posts of September 2 and September 11 to learn more.

LLRX.com - Electronic Guide to the Best Mexican Law Websites

A new entry for this site. They post excellent guides to doing legal research on the internet (and in actual books) for many countries.

Diplomacy Monitor

ResearchBuzz

*St. Thomas University School of Law Diplomacy Monitor
Sometimes you just gotta let the title speak for itself. And the announcement. "The St. Thomas University School of Law Diplomacy Monitor utilizes specially developed proprietary software to monitor the global output of communiqués, official statements, press briefings, position papers, interview transcripts and news releases from hundreds of diplomacy-related websites in near real-time and channel it into a synthesized information stream for scholars, diplomats, journalists, researchers, students and others interested in the interaction among nations." It's available at http://diplomacymonitor.com .
Despite all the sources being plumbed the interface is clean; the front page contains the latest diplomacy stories on the left (which include source, linked headline, date, and a cache link) and information about the site on the right. There's no search form on the front page; instead you'll see one on the bottom of the documents page after you click "Access the Monitor".
"Access the Monitor"? It's a button at the top of the front page that drops you into a list of diplomacy-related documents (most recent ones first.) You can browse through those, use the sorting links on the left (by region, by issue, by nation, and more) or use the search engine at the bottom. A search for "Nuclear" found over 400 results from sources ranging from The United Nations to the North Korea Korean Central News Agency to the Japan Ministry for Foreign Affairs to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Note that search results are sorted by relevance, not by date.

Access to CRS Reports

beSpacific

Public Access to CRS Reports Will Remain Limited
An incisive news article from the December 12 Ohio Times-Reporter presents Congressional and advocacy group perspectives on public access to CRS reports, a controversial issue about which I have posted a number of times. CRS does not maintain a public access website, but online access to selected reports is available through several non-government websites, and copies of the full-text reports from 1995 are available for purchase individually or through a subscription service, from one private source.

Vivisimo

Inter Alia

One in a Hundred
Vivisimo, one of my favorite search tools, has been named one of the the Top 100 'companies that matter most in digital content management' by EContent Magazine. If this site isn't one of the tools in your search arsenal, you're really missing out.

Posted by: Tom Mighell at 6:52 am

I agree -- I really like the hierarchy of results and I find it particularly useful for academic searching. I mentioned it here in June -- but it bears repeating.

Setting up Alerts

Have you tried setting up Alerts in any of the journal databases?
If you are doing ongoing research in a particular subject this is a great way to make sure that you are keeping up to date. Several of our journal databases allow you to do this, notably Current Contents Connect, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, EconLit and Science Direct.

The process is a bit different in each database, but in each you construct a search for journal articles that meet your criteria. When you have refined it to return the articles you want, you save it as an alert. You enter an e-mail address and each week the search will be run again automatically. The citations for any new hits will be e-mailed to you. This way you don’t have to worry that you might be missing the newest releases.

Tisch Library has posted a guide to Subscribing to E-mail Research Alerts. The databases are listed there under the vendor, so CCC is under Web of Knowledge and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts and EconLit are under Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.
If you have any questions about setting up an alert, please come by the Reference Desk or e-mail your questions to me at jane.morris@tufts.edu .

This might be fun -- I put in the word library and the winner was Al Sharpton!

Inter Alia

Thursday, November 20
The presidential race gears up on the Internet
Here's another way to see how your candidate is faring in the presidential campaign: GoogleRace2004. Just enter your search terms (say, "social security"), and the site sends that query along with the name of each candidate's name, to see how frequently the terms appear together. In my "social security" search, Joe Lieberman came up first, John Kerry second, and Al Sharpton third. Hmm.

Phrase Wildcards

Articles about little known search features often cause me to glaze over -- but I could imagine remembering and using the one below:

On The Net - Unusual Power Web Searching Commands

WILD CARD WORD WITHIN A PHRASE
Standard truncation can be a very useful search tool to retrieve variants on the stem of a search term without ORing the variants themselves. Currently only available on AltaVista, with the truncation symbol (sometimes called wild card) of the asterisk *, it is disappointing that truncation is not available at Google, AlltheWeb, and other search engines.
But there is a bit of an exception. Both Google and AltaVista do offer something that I call the "Wild Card Word Within a Phrase." Both engines even use the same syntax. This only works within a phrase search (multiple words in an exact sequence designated in the query with quotation marks [""]). The * is an operator that represents any single word in that exact position. Like in AlltheWeb's special site: operators above, the * is not character-based truncation but represents a whole word.
Searching to find a quotation is an easy example. Trying to find "a little neglect may breed mischief" when you are not sure of the second to last word? Just search "a little neglect may * mischief". If even fewer words are known, use multiple asterisks as in "a little * * * mischief".

Arab Human Development Report 2003

The latest report, just released, has been covered heavily in the news in the past few days. It is available for download at the UNDP site linked below.
Today's program on "The Connection" features a discussion of the report and reaction. It will be archived at WBUR.

UNDP - Arab Human Development Report 2003

Building a Knowledge Society
"AHDR 2002 challenged the Arab world to overcome three cardinal obstacles to human development posed by widening gaps in freedom, women's empowerment and knowledge across the region.
Looking at international, regional and local developments affecting Arab countries since the report was issued confirms that those challenges remain critically pertinent and may have become even graver, especially in the area of freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent than the status of Arab knowledge at the beginning of the 21st century, the theme of this second report. Despite the presence of significant human capital in the region, AHDR 2003 concludes that disabling constraints hamper the acquisition, diffusion and production of knowledge in Arab societies. This human capital, under more promising conditions, could offer a substantial base for an Arab knowledge renaissance.

Primary Sources on the Web

LISNews.com | Using Primary Sources on the Web

Using Primary Sources on the Web is a nice little site put together by by the Instruction & Research Services Committee of the Reference and User Service Association History Section in the American Library Association.
"Students and researchers now have greater access to primary source materials for historical research than ever before. The traditional use of sources available in print and microfilm continues to be the foundation for research, but in some cases documents, letters, maps, photographs of ancient artifacts and other primary material are available online in different formats from free websites or subscription services on the internet. Users of primary sources have always needed to examine their sources critically, but now with the proliferation of electronic resources from a wide variety of web site producers, evaluation is more important than ever before. Users of web resources must now consider the authenticity of documents, what person or organization is the internet provider, and whether the electronic version serves their needs. This brief guide is designed to provide students and researchers with information to help them evaluate the internet sources and the quality of primary materials that can be found online. "

Agora

FAO : Online scientific information on food and agriculture for poorest countries

14 October 2003, Rome -- Students, researchers and academics in some of the world's poorest countries will gain free or low-cost access to a wealth of scientific literature under a new initiative announced today by FAO and a range of public and private sector partners.

The AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) initiative will provide access to more than 400 key journals in food, nutrition, agriculture and related biological, environmental and social sciences.

This resource will be added to the Fletcher International Relations Resources.

New tool for Business research

Lots of links to try in Gary Price's post, below. But if you are doing business, finance or economics research try SMEALSearch, linked below; it is pretty impressive.

ResourceShelf

Business Research
New Search Engine Focused on Business Documents is Now Available on the Web
For several years I've been an admirer and frequent user of ResearchIndex/CiteSeer, a focused or "niche" web engine that retrieves full-text articles and other documents in the information technology, computer science, and telecommunications disciplines. It not only offers links to the material but also provides information (if available) as to other authors who have cited the paper in their bibliogaphy. To my knowledge, CiteSeer/ResearchIndex was the first engine, using open web content, that allowed for citation searching. CiteSeer was developed at NEC Research. A member of the team at NEC that developed the engine was Lee Giles. Giles is now a professor at Penn St. University and in the past year introduced a search tool with many of the features available from ResearchIndex called eBizSearch. This "niche" tool focuses on e-business content.
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Today, Dr. Giles and his team at Penn St. have introduced SMEALSearch . This niche engine (named after the business school at Penn St.) focuses on, "academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business." The following comes from the SMEALSearch engine's web site.
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SMEALSearch is the only search engine focused on Business that can:
- automatically gather and index specific research information such as author, title, abstract, and citations.
- perform key-word searches on the full content of all documents selected.
- conduct citation searches to identify the most influential articles.
- accept article submissions from users, ensuring the most complete and current database in the Business world.

The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts.
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Search Engine Fazzle Has Interesting Features

ResearchBuzz News -- September 18 - September 24

Search Engine Fazzle Has Interesting Features (excerpts)

So Fazzle. It's a meta-search engine. It searches Wisenut, Altavista, Teoma, Lycos, Yahoo, MSN, and Netscape. Various other search engines are available depending on what kind of search you do (look at the top of the front page and you'll see tabs for several search types, including Web's best, general Web, and general downloads. Look on the advanced search page for even more search category options.)

To do a simple search put something in the query box and choose whether your searching AND, OR, searching for a phrase, searching for a URL, or doing a Boolean query.

Search results are interestingly formatted. You'll notice that every result has a checkbox next to it. We'll get back to that in a moment. Results include the title of the page, very brief snippet, URL, on which search engines it's ranked and where, and the percentage of popularity. You have the choice of ranking results by popularity, title, URL, description, and domain.

Now all this is fairly standard. What I found most interesting about these search results was the little checkbox. Check the items you find most interesting and you'll have the option to e-mail those items to yourself or somebody else (that option is under the query box and above the results list on the results page.) Also check out the "Reports" item which gives you statistics about your search and a grouping of search engines where your results appeared. Very interesting

More on RefWorks

Thinking about using RefWorks to manage your citations, format footnotes and bibliographies?
Tisch Library has a very good About RefWorks page with a very cool new tutorial linked at See RefWorks in Action.

If you missed it, see the previous post about workshops and an Endnote/RefWorks comparison that appeared in this blog on September 2.

Citation Managers -- Classes at Tisch

Citation management software keeps track of the sources you use, allows you to import citations directly from some databases, and automatically formats footnotes and bibliographies. One version, called Refworks, is available to all Tufts students. There's a link to it on our A-Z List of Databases. You need to create a log-in for yourself, then you can use it from any internet connection. Instructions are available on the Refworks website.

Another product that many students use is Endnote. It must be purchased and installed on your computer. The two are compatible, so if you begin with one, you can export your citations to the other.

If you think you're interested in using either one, you might want to sign up for one of the classes offered at the Tisch Library. A page comparing the two products is available on the Tisch website.

New Translation Tool

ResearchBuzz! -- Search engine news and information.

Fagan Releases Translation Tool

Tired of visiting all the online translation sites to find the one you need? Michael Fagan's Translation Wizard gathers up over 40 tools and puts them all together through one interface. It's available at http://www.faganfinder.com/translate/ .

If you've ever used Babelfish or Google's translator this will look familiar to you. Enter text or an URL choose the languages (the languages go from Afrikaans to Yiddish and include Arabic and traditional and simplified Chinese) and choose translate. There's also a neat link called "switch," which will switch your from and to languages.

Another interesting feature is the "identify language" button, for when you know you want to translate it but you don't know what it is. When I tested it I discovered you had to use a critical mass of words; I couldn't just put in one phrase and get a language listing back.

Instructions for using the Wizard are available at http://www.faganfinder.com/translate/info.php . A list of sources drawn on by the Wizard is at http://www.faganfinder.com/translate/tool.php .
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PowerPoint Is Evil

A discussion of the evils of "powerpoint" presentations is in current issue of WIRED. An excerpt and link follow:

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. "

For the full article:

ASIL Insights

ASIL Insights Index

This is a full text electronic publication featuring scholarly articles by international law experts on current hot topics. It's worth keeping up with the articles here, and you can subscribe via e-mail.
Articles for the current month:

The Legal Status of Foreign Economic Interests in Occupied Iraq
By Pieter H.F. Bekker
July 2003
The Obligation of the Coalition Provisional Authority to Protect Iraq's Cultural Heritage
By Ali Khan
July 2003
Belgian Law concerning The Punishment of Grave Breaches of International Humanitarian Law: A Contested Law with Uncontested Objectives
By Stefaan Smis and Kim Van der Borght
July 2003

Westlaw Named Preferred Online Legal Research Service

"The readers of Law Office Computing have confirmed what hundreds of thousands of attorneys already know: Westlaw(R) is the legal industry's most preferred online research service."

Note: Westlaw is available to students at two terminals in the Ginn Library Reference Room.

Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digitial Document Collection

Excerpt of an e-mail announcement by Harvard Law Librarian Terry Martin:

The Harvard Law School Library has just launched a new website devoted to analysis and digitization of documents relating to
the Nuremberg Trials: "Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digitial Document Collection" at http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu

The Library has approximately one million pages of documents relating to the trial of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and to the twelve trials of other accused war criminals before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT).

These documents, which include trial transcripts, briefs, document books, evidence files, and other papers, have been studied by lawyers, scholars, and other researchers in the areas of history, ethics, genocide, and war crimes, and are of particular interest to officials and students of current international tribunals involving war crimes and crimes against humanity.

beSpacific: Documents and Resources on EU E-Government

Documents and Resources on EU E-Government
From the EU eGovernment Conference 2003, 7-8 July 2003:
Linking up Europe: the importance of interoperability for e-government services

EU Ministerial Declaration on E-Government

See also this useful resource on e-gov:

National eGovernment sites, which includes Member States national eGovernment websites, Candidate countries national eGovernment websites, EEA/EFTA countries national eGovernment websites, and eGovernment websites worldwide (some examples).

Note: I will be adding this portal of National eGovernment sites to the International Relations Resources on the European Union page.

LLRX

If you ever expect to do any research on international, foreign or comparative law, LLRX.com is a great place to start. As an example, see the latest addition to their guides:

LLRX.com - A Guide to Russian Legal Research

New Interlibrary Loan Option

ILLiad, a new web-based interlibrary loan system, was implemented by the Tufts libraries on July 1, 2003. Members of the Tufts community can use ILLiad to request material not available at Tufts or through the Virtual Catalog of the BLC libraries. It can be used for books, journal articles and theses. When the requested material arrives, the user will be notified by e-mail to pick it up at the Circulation Desk. Eventually ILLiad will even provide desktop delivery of articles in electronic form.
The link to ILLiad and to instructions for using it are on the Library Services page.

The Interlibrary Loan Assistant is Linda Batista. If you have questions about interlibrary loan, please call her at extension 76421 or e-mail linda.batista@tufts.edu.

GeoData.gov

This resource has been added to the Fletcher International Relations Resources.

ResourceShelf

Geospatial Data
New Resource, U.S. Government Launches GeoData.Gov
"geodata.gov is a web-based portal for one-stop access to maps, data and other geospatial services that will simplify the ability of all levels of government and citizens to find geospatial data and learn more about geospatial projects underway."

New words find place in updated Webster's

CNN.com - - Jun. 30, 2003

Now a home for 'McJob,' 'headbanger,' 'Frankenfood'
Monday, June 30, 2003 Posted: 4:06 PM EDT (2006 GMT)

Once a decade, Merriam-Webster redoes its best-selling dictionary. The 11th edition, available in bookstores Tuesday, includes 10,000 new words and more than 100,000 new meanings and revisions among its 225,000 definitions.

Google/Alltheweb comparison

Microdoc News: AllTheWeb Now A Better Search Experience Than Google

AllTheWeb Now A Better Search Experience Than Google

After having reviewed AllTheWeb in March, I returned to see how AllTheWeb is shaping up against Google. Putting AllTheWeb through its paces against Google, I was surprised. In general, AllTheWeb is a more satisfying search experience than Google now.

beSpacific: New Net Filtering Study Released

New Net Filtering Study Released
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Online Policy Group (OPG) yesterday announced the release of their joint report, Internet Blocking in Public Schools, A Study on Internet Access in Educational Institutions. "The study found that blocking software overblocked state-mandated curriculum topics extensively -- for every web page correctly blocked as advertised, one or more was blocked incorrectly."

New search engine

For those of you who remember Northern Light and miss it's "folder" approach to web searching -- there is a new search engine that clusters results in a similar way. It's called Vivisimo. I tried it, searching for international relations, and got great results. It looks particularly good for academic use.

Search Engine News
Trio develops search tool that sorts results in helpful clusters
Source: post-gazette.com
Vivisimo, has developed a clustering engine that takes the top results from several common search engines and puts them in categories that can help people find the kind of information that is most relevant to them.

Here's what be Spacific has to say about it:
beSpacific: "Clustering" Search Engine Worth a Review

"Clustering" Search Engine Worth a Review
Vivisimo, co-winner of the 2002 Search Engine Watch award for Best Meta Search Engine, is featured in this new article, CMU (Carnegie Mellon) trio develops Internet search tool that sorts results in helpful clusters. (via Search Engine News). For more information, see the company's Clustering Engine webpage.

Obscure Google Features

Found this article through Library Stuff -- It has a lot of intricate tips and tricks for those who really want to know how to use obscure Google features. Some of them are pretty cool.

Search Engine News

Seeing beyond the obvious at Google
Source: boston.com
While it may not be apparent from the sparse-looking homepage, there's a lot more to Google than meets the eye.

EISIL -- new portal for treaty research

Below is the text of the announcement of the availability of EISIL, received from Jill Watson at ASIL. This should become an invaluable resource for locating authoritative treaty texts and information.

The Electronic Information System for International Law (EISIL) database is
a collaborative project created by The American Society of International Law
with the support of the Mellon Foundation.

You will see on the home page of EISIL (http://www.eisil.org) that you can
browse through outlines of each subject category. They contain links to
primary documents, recommended web sites, and research guides, as well as
other added information.

Five initial prototype subjects may now be previewed.
- General International Law
- International Criminal Law
- International Economic Law
- International Environmental Law
- International Human Rights Law

The title link, for example "Charter of the United Nations" will take you
directly to the most reputable and stable web version of the resource. The
"More Information" link will take you to valuable added information on the
document or web site, including legal citation, alternate titles,
description, alternate web sites and relevant dates (such as signature,
entry into force).

You may view the list of resources by title only, or check off a "show
description" box to display a brief summary of each resource. You may opt
to list only one type of resource: Primary Documents, or Research Guides for
example.

You can also perform quick and advanced searches of the EISIL database,
customizing your search by dates, keywords, resource type and many other
options.

EISIL allows you to mark records to save for a research project. The list
of saved records can be printed, downloaded or emailed with live links and
all added information.

The database project has reached the end of the design phase, and is moving
through the beginnings of the data entry phase. In time, all of the
categories will be populated, and kept up-to-date by their authors.

Google

An interesting story about Google from the ecommerce Times:
The Web, According to Google
By Alex Salkever
June 10, 2003
Two quotes from the article below:
"Call it the Google Gap -- the difference between the growing perception that the site is omniscient and the fact that it isn't. This can be particularly damaging for businesses that run afoul of the rules Google uses to ensure that sites don't manipulate its rankings. While Google's concern over cheaters is justified, too often its rules punish innocent sites, critics claim."
"Should Google further consolidate its control of the search world, argues Harvard's Zittrain, the Web could become the equivalent of a company town. That prospect prompts him to argue that "we need a concept of the public interest for the Internet that we haven't completely worked through yet. Somewhere between 'the market will magically take care of this' and 'let's regulate the heck out of it,' there has to be a solution."

Getting More From Google (from

Getting More From Google (from MIT's Technology Review)
Searching the Web can be a frustrating exercise. Here are some tips and tricks to help you find exactly what you want from the leading search engine.
By Simson Garfinkel
Gadget Master
June 4, 2003

Another Search Engine

Another posting from beSpacific about a new search engine that may rival or exceed the usefulness of Google:

"The Register reviews the pros and cons of Turbo10.com, still in beta, which unfortunately seems to have crashed due to the traffic generated by this new-found recognition? Not an auspicious start, but check-in on the site when it reappears, as one of the major incentives to do so is its focus on searching the invisible web."
Here's a quote from the Register review that explains what's special about this search engine: "Turbo10 searches the Deep Net - a vast array of specialist databases that range from business associations, universities, libraries, and government departments. These specialist search engines are inaccessible to traditional crawler-based engines such as Altavista.com and google.com who can only index static pages. Turbo10 is the first commercial metasearch engine to connect to hundreds of these specialised engines en masse, broadening the depth and range of search results for the online searcher."

Berkeley has a great page on using search engines with a good explanation of the Invisible Web.

Disappearing Databases

The following comes from beSpacific:

Federally Funded Databases Continue to Disappear
In Another Casualty (registration req'd), Margaret M. Jobe, Chair, Notable Documents Panel, American Library Association's Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) reviews the federal databases and resources that have been removed from the public domain by the Bush Administration in the name of national security, as well as those that may be eliminated in the near future, including AGRICOLA and the Global Legal Information Network.

New SIPRI database

For researchers in security studies, SIPRI has a new collection of databases that is very impressive. It's called FIRST (Facts on International Relations and Security Trends). It contains information on military expenditures, conflicts of various types, arms control regimes, nuclear weapons, peacekeeping activities and related topics. I think it's going to be very useful.

Citing the Web

I have gotten a lot of questions in the last few weeks about citing different types of sources on the Web. If you want to cite something that is not covered in our Citation Style Guide, try the Chicago Manual's online site.

Two Search Engines

I just discovered two search engines I didn't know about. One is Daypop, for searching, news, weblogs and RSS feeds. If you want to search what other people are blogging about, this is a place to try.
The other is UPI's own search engine of its archive of over 100,000 photos, searchable by keyword and dates.